Chris Selley on Jack Layton: ‘Imagine’ we just ‘Let It Be’

On the Jack Layton vigil: 'Imagine' we just 'Let It Be'

When reporters on Parliament Hill tweeted news that the carillon would play John Lennon’s Imagine as part of a vigil for Jack Layton on the first anniversary of his untimely passing, my eyes nearly burst from their sockets from violent rolling. Admittedly, I find any rendition of humanity’s highest, most overrated and most overplayed achievement in hippy-drippy nonsense somewhat exasperating. (Why can’t Let It Be get a look-in in these situations? It’s a vastly better song and conveys the same basic message without the communist-smelling specifics.) But it seemed particularly inappropriate given who was being honored.

After all, Jack Layton was the guy who dragged the NDP out of its hippy-dippy reverie and made the necessary compromises — hyper-professional campaigns and fundraising at the expense of some hurt feelings among the grassroots, abandoning any talk of “socialism,” adopting asymmetrical federalism (“the world will live as one,” my eye) when it became clear they’d need to break through in Quebec and there was no other way to do it — to bring it into the big leagues.

Good for him, I say. The New Democrats aren’t my cup of tea at all, but they gave Ottawa, and Quebec, a richly deserved shock. And the pugnacious Thomas Mulcair is carrying that general approach forward in fine style. If anything they should be singing war songs, not Kumbaya.

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If practitioners and followers of Canadian politics generally held their opponents in sane regard or disregard, it wouldn’t bother me. But they don’t. Stephen Harper is widely portrayed as a rapacious devourer of all that’s good about Canada. Michael Ignatieff was a foreign agent. Layton himself was appallingly dubbed “Taliban Jack” for asking questions that others should have. To the extent he is being beatified a year later, it can be seen as the equally unhealthy flip side to that: Undeserved demonization, meet undeserved sainthood.

Politics relies on heroes and the deluded support of its partisans, of course, but we shouldn’t cheer each new delusion. The NDP are not fighting for John Lennon’s dream world. They’re fighting for the prime minister’s office by moving to the centre — a process Layton spearheaded.

He wasn’t a hero, wasn’t a saint. He was an uncommonly skilled retail politician who gained respect for practicing a brand of politics that was less greasy and vulgar and off putting than his opponents’. That’s not nothing. It’s quite a lot, really. I don’t begrudge anyone a good vigil. But ringing bells in towers for a nice guy and and a very good politician just seems a bit … much.